Music Practice Commons^™

Community Singing As Troubled Learning: Exploring Musical, Social, And Ethical Dimensions Of Safety And Risk Among Adult Singers, Deanna Yerichuk

Music Faculty Publications

How are safety and risk negotiated within community singing? Many group facilitation techniques within adult education take as foundational that participants must feel safe to participate fully in group learning. This concern for participants safety acknowledges that power and privilege circulate unequally within any social learning context, shaped by race, gender, class, ability, sexual orientation, and in the case of singing, musical competencies. However, community singing can be safe without being comfortable. Comfort, therefore, is not the same as safety, although the two concepts are often conflated. A lack of ease with the process and/or content suggests a possibility of …